With the continuous development of computer technologies, a network has become an indispensable application for people in everyday life, and with the continuous popularity of computer network technologies, traffic load in the network is ever-increasing, which aggravates workload of a virtual gateway device.
Existing multiple gateway devices implement traffic load sharing of multiple gateway devices by using a multi-gateway load sharing protocol. Multiple gateway devices need to negotiate, by using a protocol, an active virtual gateway device that is responsible for replying to an ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) request of a client and allocating a different virtual MAC (Medium/Media Access Control) address for the client, and the rest sharing gateway devices serve as active virtual forwarding devices responsible for managing a client allocated by the active virtual gateway device. When one active virtual forwarding device encounters a fault, negotiation also needs to be performed by using a protocol to select one active virtual forwarding device from the rest active virtual forwarding devices to replace the active virtual forwarding device encountering the fault and manage a client of the active virtual forwarding device encountering the fault.
In an implementation process, negotiation always needs to be performed by using a protocol, which increases complexity of a selection process, and lowers the processing efficiency of a service mechanism, so that a process of implementing traffic load sharing of multiple gateway devices is not intelligent enough.